Lulu's is an online clothing store targeting women ages 15-25. To increase brand awareness and sales, a "15 Days of Inspiration" social media campaign is proposed. The campaign would feature the top 15 user-submitted collections of outfits featuring Lulu's clothes over 15 days. It would have a $64,000 budget, run from October to April, and include Google AdWords and promotions on Lulu's social media. The goal is to drive more traffic, followers, and sales by engaging customers and differentiating Lulu's in the digital fashion space.
1. About Lulu’s:
Lulu’s was established in 1996. It
started as a mother daughter
online clothing store. They offer
young women clothing, shoes,
and accessories.
They focus on emerging new
designers.
LuLu’s Mission and Vision:
Providing the latest for the
fashionably hip along with
providing exceptional value,
quality, and superb customer
service. By: Holly Manciero New Media Drivers License
(Lulus, 2012).
2. Target Audience
Lulu’s has a focused target demographic.
The target audience is women are usually ages 15 to 25 years old. The
women usually have a medium income levels. This is way the price
range is set for moderately priced. The average income level is around
35,000 to 50,000. The target market’s style focus is on casual and dressy
clothing for smaller sized women.
Lulu’s is primarily an online destination.
’
#LulusDesignCompetition
Which leads to its increasing need to have new social media campaigns
and larger presence.
(Lulus, 2012).
3. Goals of a New Digital Campaign
• To sell Lulu's clothing and accessories, educate the market about all that Lulu's has
to offer young women and to expand the brand awareness among juniors and
young women.
• To show why LuLu's is the best fashion choice
• Create a campaign to increase the sales, increase
page views, and rank them higher in search
engine optimization when looking for anything
related to fashion, dresses, young women clothing.
(New Media Website, Google AdWords Lesson)
(Scott, Chapter 22).
• LuLu's should use this because it has a specific target and it represents only right
now a small fraction of that market in search engine optimization. This way they can
track their success of this campaign by seeing if their percentage of sales increases
and clicks to their site increase. (Scott, Chapter 22).
4. Big Idea
• Lulu’s strength comes from being an online focused company.
• It focuses on being interactive with its audience.
• They use external links and internal links back to their sites to help generate
web traffic. (Lulus, 2012).
• Lulu’s has an interactive platform, but I found it still does not appear on the
first page for many common keyword searches from its target
demographic.
• It needs to be unique and catchy to the target audience.
• Therefore, because the goal is to increase traffic
to the website and sales I came up with the idea
called “Lulu’s 15 days of Inspiration Campaign”.
5. 15 Days of Inspiration
Pinterest Mock Up
• This would be a social media competition
where Lulu’s customers could take photographs
of their fashion inspirations and Lulu’s outfits.
• Each contestant would create and submit 15
photos of outfits that were Lulu inspired. They
would put together and design their favorite
outfits and accessories from Lulu’s items.
• Each contestant would put together a photo
collection of her Lulu pieces and outfits. Then
the collections would be submitted online for
the public to vote for the best outfits and
collections. Then for 15 days the top 15
collections will be chosen by who ever has the
highest number of votes.
• Whoever is ranked 15th will have their photos be featured on Lulu’s home page the
first day, 14th ranked on the 2nd day etc. Then the overall winner with the most votes
for the best photo collection will be feature on the last day (15th day) online as well,
but will also win a Lulu’s gift card. Each person gets her “day of fame”.
6. Budget
• Lulu’s revenue roughly 1.6 million dollars in 2011.
• Similar boutique revenue of 1.3 million- Mystique boutique.
• My research found advertising and marketing cost and
strategies should be within 3 to 4 percent of total sales
(Retail Advertising, 2010).
• Based off this, 4 percent of 1.6 million dollars is 64,000
dollars. This is my proposed budget.
• On an average of 175 per hr. for a firm to work on this that
would allow for 365.7 hours of work. Social Media Managers
would receive the most hours roughly around 20 hours a
week on the project for 3 months.
• The cost for this campaign would be on a cheaper side
because the only paid from of advertisement would come
through Google Adwords about the “15 days of Inspiration”.
7. Example of a Google Adword Campaign Cost:
• 1,176 clicks, 8,197 impressions and the total cost would be around 433.4 dollars a
day.
• Budget of 64,000 and roughly half of the money towards the Adword campaign it
could run on a budget of 32,000 for 73 days.
• Strategic fit for LuLu’s because Lulu’s strategic incentive for marketing is to connect
with their customers through innovative online marketing and focus on upcoming
designers.
• Differentiation factor.
• It aims to make Lulu’s stand out in the digital and social media world by
connecting to its target market and make the customer feel that their
inspirations and ideas matter. This campaign’s catchy title could help be found
even simply by people just looking to find inspiration.
8. Timeline
• The campaign will start in August of 2013.
• Expect to take 8 months to complete.
• 3 months of campaign planning and design- including creation of advertisements.
Those involved
- Social Media Manager
- Graphic Designer
- Web Designer
- Fashion Buyers
- Blog writer
- Research and Data developer
• Plan to finish to the pre-campaign launch by the end of October,
• Promotion of campaign from October to beginning January
• The next two months will be dedicating to launching the campaign and accepting
submissions.
9. Timeline Cont.
• The heaviest amount of promotions will occur 5
days before submissions end.
(Around 15% of promotions)
• March one month voting period.
Winners will be announced one week
after our voting period is completed.
• April- Winner is announced.
10. Rounding Out the Campaign
Overall, the combination of various digital media platforms to inform consumers of
the competition is the best choice for Lulu’s.
Google’s sponsored side-bar advertisements are very cost-effective because
sponsors ads based on an individual’s interests and search results (Google,2013).
This helps keep costs low because it has a better likelihood of reaching Lulu’s target
audience. It will gain a higher ranking for the sponsored links because of the specific
tagline of the campaign.
These sponsored ads would redirect users to Lulu’s website and social media
accounts for those interested in the competition.
Google Analytics will track the success of the campaign.
To track success there will be a midway evaluation to see if a new ad needs to be
created. In addition it can measure it by if traffic and clicks increased. Did followers
increase? Did sales increase?
Editor's Notes
Their brands consist of emerging new designers and theirbuyers travel the world so that you can find a style to call your own. They buy in limited quantities because many of the items come fresh from designers' studios.
It will show it’s the best choice by showing them it has everything from casual to chic and dressy clothing styles. This idea would relate to all of those engine searches, but trying to come up in a high ranking in women’s clothing and fashion can be difficult without a distinctive idea. There are so many stores in this category that it can be hard to be found without something to differentiate them. It is more than simply having an online presence it has to be talked about and remembered.The campaign I am proposing will grow Lulus presence in Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. LuLu's needs to grow its market share by using a unique campaign to help generate clicks and traffic.
This way the individuals will want more votes to win and create more traffic to Lulu’s sites by promoting others to visit their website. Yes, Lulu’s is on social media platforms, but they do not do anything too different compared to its competitors. This campaign would help them utilize all their social media platforms. All platforms could be used to promote the campaign. Pinners on Pinterest could pin Lulu’s clothes and ideas based upon the outfits others are posting for ideas. It could use Facebook to inform their target market of the competition. Twitter could help create a hashtag to increase trending alerts. This is all very low cost as well.
Lulu’s opened in 1996. I also then researched a similar boutique shop that sells many of the same designers and styles that opened in 1999 and found they have revenue of 1.3 million, Mystique boutique.I compared the two to see if the division of recommended marketing and advertising was the same, which they were.